Adobe Camera Raw "Batch conversion" of White Balance

... or other settings.

I took a number of pictures today with my Nikon D5000 with the White Balance set to "incandescent", which was silly, because all of them were taken outside on a sunny day. As I had taken only NEF pictures, I was not too concerned. I know that one easily can adjust white balance in RAW files. The only question was how.

My first attempt was using View NX. I highlighted all the pictures in the browser, clicked on "Quick Adjustments" and chose the white balance "Calculate Automatically". I then sat back with a good book and waited while View NX updated all the files. There was a progress indicator in the lower right corner, so I could see approximately how thick a book I could read. Somewhere along the line I also clicked on the Save button, when View NX prompted me to do so.

The "problem" was that View NX did not update the original setting in the NEF files, and Adobe products only read the original setting. In other words, even though they looked fine in View NX, they still looked wrong in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw.

So the solution had to be within the Adobe products themselves:

1. Double click on the first image in Adobe Bridge, to open Adobe Camera Raw.
2. Select the White Balance you want (for example Auto or Daylight).
3. Click on Done, to close ACR.
4. In Adobe Bridge, right click on the image and select Develop Settings > Copy Settings in the pop-up menu.
5. Select all the other images.
6. Right click on them and select Develop Settings > Paste Settings.
7. In the dialogue you get, choose which settings you want to paste. To get just White Balance, you can select the Subset White Balance.
8. Click on OK.

Once ACR has finished processing the files, they will look fine in Adobe products.